Main Page Favorable Time to Build on Experiencer Getting to Mars Science Instruments Persistent Spirit Well-Placed Opportunity Extension Project/Program Management Mars Exploration 　 çiçek - çiçek, çiçekçi Diyet Uzmani Country lyrics 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Red Rover Goes to Mars

Persistent Spirit

Spirit¡¦s first photos looking around its landing site revealed a rock-strewn plain. A few shallow, dusty hollows lay nearby and a few hills and crater rims interrupted the flat horizon. Even before the rover had rolled off its lander platform, scientists chose ¡§Bonneville Crater,¡¨ about 300 meters (328 yards) to the northeast, as a destination that might offer access to underlying rock layers. They eyed the Columbia Hills, about 2.6 kilometers (1.6 miles) to the south-later. An airbag that was not fully retracted under the lander presented an obstacle to simply driving Spirit forward off the lander. Engineers had practiced many scenarios for getting the rover off. They chose to tell Spirit to turn in place about 120 degrees before driving down a side ramp. The rover rolled onto martian soil on Jan. 15. The next day, it extended its robotic arm to a patch of soil and took humankind¡¦s first microscopic image of the surface of another planet. Scientists chose a nearby, football-size stone dubbed ¡§Adirondack¡¨ as the first rock to get full research treatment with all four tools on the arm. Spirit reached out to the rock on Jan. 20, but the examination was interrupted by a computer and communication crisis.
Spirit stopped communicating on Jan. 21. For two worry-filled days, it sometimes failed to send signals at all and other times sent signals without meaningful data. Engineers began to coax some helpful data from Spirit on Jan. 23. They learned the onboard computer had rebooted itself more than 60 times in three days. They developed a strategy to stabilize the rover while continuing to diagnose and remedy the problem over the next several days. The diagnosis was a flight-soft-ware glitch that obstructs proper management of the onboard computer¡¦s flash memory when the memory is too full. The main remedy was to clear Spirit¡¦s flash memory and, from that point on, to avoid getting the memory too full on either rover.
Spirit finished with ¡§Adirondack,¡¨ where the rock abrasion tool provided the first-ever look inside a rock on Mars. Then the rover set out toward ¡§Bonneville Crater,¡¨ examining ¡§Humphrey¡¨ and other rocks on the way. It reached the crater rim on March 11 and looked inside. No bedrock layers were visible to tempt the team into sending Spirit down into the bowl. On March 31, the rover completed an eight-day inspection of a wind-scalloped boulder called ¡§Mazatzal¡¨ just outside the crater. That rock, like all others examined on the plain Spirit was crossing, came from a volcanic eruption. However, thin coatings on the rock and veins inside it suggest that it might have been affected by water at some point.
The rover spent 10 weeks driving from near ¡§Bonneville¡¨ to the edge of ¡§Columbia Hills¡¨ while surveying soils, rocks and smaller craters along the route. Its longest single-day advance was 123.7 meters (135 yards) on May 10, about 20 percent farther than Sojourner drove during its entire three months of operations on Mars in 1997. As became typical for long-drive days, the feat combined a blind-drive portion, in which Spirit followed a route that rover planners at JPL had determined in advance using stereo images, and an autonomous navigation portion, during which the rover watched ahead for hazards and chose its own path to avoid them.
Spirit reached the base of the hills on June 11. There, it examined an oddly knobby rock dubbed ¡§Pot of Gold¡¨ and other eroded features before ascending a ridge called ¡§West Spur.¡¨ Climbing that ridge in early August, Spirit reached exposed bedrock for the first time, seven months after landing.